SIP

Last night I was made aware of the case of Ontario v. Quon where a SWAT officer in the Ontario, CA city had his personal pager messages read and sued based on the idea that his messages were private. While the case has potential ramifications for the privacy in the workplace what is more interesting to many is the fact that this case shows the Supreme Court Justices are very out of touch with today's technology. This conclusion has been reached by Ashby Jones at the Wall Street Journal as well as Kashmir Hill and the AP.

I have written before about how great Cablevision has been in providing high-speed Optimum WiFi access to customers throughout parts of Connecticut and New York. Now this service allows users to roam onto other cable networks provided by Comcast and Time Warner Cable. This means in the tri-state areas, there will be more coverage than ever and Cablevision customers can now jump on Time Warner Cable WiFi and Xfinity WiFi networks.

As WiFi agreements like this continue to take place, the value of standalone WiFi devices increases, meaning the need to purchase 3G or 4G services declines. Having used some of these services in the past I can tell you they are typically most useful when you have a powerful WiFi device like a laptop, as handheld devices like smartphones seem to lack the power needed to fully maximize the wireless broadband experience.

It has been a while since I met with executives from Odin Telesystems but it all came back to me when I sat down a week ago with company

President & CEO Hanz Johansson to discuss his company's DSP resource solutions which can act as gateways, transcoding devices and PBX building-blocks when coupled with the right software like Asterisk.

I first met the company at a trade show in New York in the mid-nineties and followed up later that year by going to the company's Texas HQ to learn about how they play in the space. At the time, Odin was a relatively new entrant into the US and they were going up against high-flying Dialogic, NMS and Brooktrout - three companies who have been subsequently merged with a bunch more companies added in such as Snowshore, Excel etc.

I recently sat down with Ken Murray - President & CEO VanillaSoft to discuss his views on social networking, prospecting and making more sales. His company sells a solution which helps companies manage leads more effectively by providing an autodialer, next best call logic and a real-time dashboard The company's CRM system provides inline document management, call scripting and a preview and progressive dialer. The latter provides greater productivity increases but decreases how much the agent knows about the client before making the call.

Ken Murray - President & CEO VanillaSoft discusses how sales and marketing has evolved from outside sales to inside sales and more recently social media-based selling/lead generation

Other features include call recording but what was more interesting to me were comments Murray made about social media.

If you want to know how carriers choose equipment providers to partner with look no further than the mating habits of the Sumatran Rhinoceros. Before you ask me if I am willing to share some of my medication with you, please hear me out. You see the male rhino has to fight off other rhinos and then chase the female for potentially long distances until mating is allowed.

And this is exactly the sort of thing that happens when carriers decide to partner with an equipment provider.

As mobility becomes a larger part of boosting productivity and satisfying the desires of companies to keep workers connected, NEC has partnered with FMC company Varaha to add value to its solutions. NEC has always been a solid tech company but they have decreasing mindshare in the enterprise/SMB market according to VARs and corporate buyers I encounter. They certainly aren't alone in this regard but to counter a lack of mindshare they have done a very good job of making aggressive acquisitions and relationships over the years. Sphere and Active Voice /AVST come immediately to mind.

I am back from Dallas, TX where I met with dozens of communications and tech companies and I gained a great deal of insight on industry hotspots as well as where the speed bumps are.

Open Source

Based on the resellers I spoke with, the move to open source continues with more of the agent community and interconnects 2.0 learning about and selling these solutions.

IP Security Cameras

I spoke with Robert Messer of distributor ABP and he shared with me the wonder of IP security cameras which work with digital signage to show alerts on screens throughout an office. He mentioned that people think twice about getting their hands caught in the cookie jar when they realize it could be broadcast throughout a company.

A major court just killed the idea of net neutrality. Where do we go from here?

Yesterday a three-judge panel unanimously tossed out the FCC's August 2008 cease and desist order against Comcast, which had taken measures to slow BitTorrent transfers but which had voluntarily discontinued the practice earlier in the year.

Dan Foster, MegaPath chief sales and marketing officer, earlier this month told TMC's Paula Bernier that MegaPath would be "active" in M&A in the next six months. Obviously this wasn't a case of overhyping the truth as in a press release, the companies jointly touted the merger of Covad and MegaPath as creating one of the largest managed service local exchange carriers (MSLEC) in the United States. It continues by explaining the combined businesses will have the largest Ethernet, DSL and T1 footprint in North America and be the only MSLEC capable of providing a full range of Internet, voice, security and VPN services nationwide.

TMCnet's Erin Harrison believes this is some of the biggest industry news to emerge since Nortel's assets were auctioned off.